This Bloomberg article, reprinted by “The Japan Times”, indicates the world’s global investors and banks are not going to support the next generational attempt to rely on nuclear power to resolve not only the shortage of energy, but also the concept of investing in nuclear power to solve the CO2-caused climate change/global warming issue. So where will the unaffordable nuclear industry find financing? Obviously, from you, the taxpayer demanded of you under penalty of law by your country’s government.
This ought to tell the average citizen everywhere that new nuclear power plants are not only a terrible idea from a world-wide health and safety issue, but also a financial disaster simply waiting to destroy economies everywhere. If the capitalists expected to capitalize nuclear energy, chances are it will never be financed, and therefore our collective world leaders should abort their concept of eliminating increased CO2 by 2050 pie-in-sky thumb-sucking pacifier to us all. They told the lie; they know it’s never going to happen; and they should come clean and admit they are wrong. But they won’t.
So that means we are all living on borrowed time that we all have long known is running short. We have been fed similar lies over a few decades before to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, and no progress was ever made, and this one is the same, only worse, and most likely the last because our borrowed time has run out . . . To survive we must learn to relive a different, older kind of life, but that’s not going to happen either until it’s too late; in fact it is probably already too late. ~llaw
Building nuclear power is a bridge too far for world’s private investors
The next generation of nuclear reactors will need to be financed by taxpayers because private investors aren’t willing to bear the risks associated with building new plants.
That was the warning from bankers at a meeting of industry and government officials in Prague this week. The Nuclear Energy Agency event underscored the hard decisions Western economies soon need to make to keep one of their biggest clean energy sources going. While the public have warmed to nuclear in recent years, spiraling project costs have made private equity cautious.
Officials have estimated that the world needs to spend $5 trillion to triple nuclear-power generation over the next 25 years. The problem is that years of delays and billion-dollar budget overruns at European and the U.S. projects are spooking investors, and scores of reactors already running on borrowed time will need to be replaced. No private investors want to take on construction risks, said Simon Taylor, a financier at the Cambridge Nuclear Energy Center.
“We’re at a critical juncture of in the history of nuclear energy,” said William Magwood, director general of the Nuclear Energy Agency. “We have to move quickly. Financing is critical.”
Earlier this year, Electricite de France said its nuclear project at Hinkley Point in the U.K. would cost as much as £10 billion ($13 billion) extra to build and take several years longer than planned. In the U.S., Southern’s Vogtle nuclear facility came in more than $16 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule.
“Unfortunately, the nuclear industry has been its own worst enemy,” said Anurag Gupta, chief risk officer at Sequoia Investment Management.
While some private capital has gone toward designing small modular reactors — factory-built units theoretically cheaper to build than traditional plants — those projects have also been plagued by delays pushing full commercialization years later than expected. That leaves nuclear advocates struggling for investor support with the technology at hand.
Rothschild & Co.’s Steven Vaughan, an adviser for U.K.’s proposed Sizewell C nuclear plant, echoed the view that investors are wary of taking on exposure to construction risk.
Equity investment interest in Sizewell, currently owned by the U.K. government and minority stakeholder EDF, has been muted, with Centrica suggesting it could become a stakeholder.
Compounding nuclear power project risks are the long life span of the assets and the uncertain development of electricity markets. Historically, nations alleviated that risk by building reactors themselves. That’s still the case in China and Russia — the two countries building the most plants.
“It’s hard for any investor to think about market design 50 years into the future,” said Iain Smedley, chairman of global banking at Barclays. “It’s therefore very important they’re comfortable with the social contract.”
Some delegates in Prague suggested economies need to think about nuclear power beyond simply profit and loss. It’s an emissions-free energy source that can help meet climate targets, as well as supporting a skilled workforce.
“There is a vast need for state involvement,” said Marcin Kaminski, risk manager building Poland’s first reactors at Polskie Elektrownie Jadrowe.
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The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expired on Friday, June 7, leaving many people who were affected by nuclear … All Things Considered. Next Up: …
That is a red line drawn by the US president, who does not want to have America pulled into a direct conflict with nuclear-armed Moscow. … war, won’t …
FILE – An aerial photo shows the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, California’s last nuclear power plant, in Avila Beach, Calif., June 20, 2010. On Thursday, June 13, 2024, former state and federal officials joined environmentalists to spotlight soaring cost estimates for keeping the plant running beyond 2025. (Joe Johnston/The Tribune via AP, File)
This late story is an important last-minute fill-in article and cannot be found in the daily “TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS” selections posted, as always, below. But it is about PG&E and the California fight over extending the nuclear power plant’s operating future beyond its scheduled shutdown next year, which, if extended, would be one of the most irresponsible decision California ever made if the Diablo Canyon plant were allowed even 5 more years of operation. And now PG&E (the plant’s evil owner) is asking for twice the money originally estimated, and also the extension of its ultimate shutdown 20+ years hence to 2050.
But the backstory is not about money, which is the basic political argument, of course, against extending the plant’s life. Though the argument should be entirely about nuclear safety, but money, sadly, always comes first in virtually all scenarios. There are a few points about the multiple nuclear dangers and other negative issues of continuing to operate the plant, but it is a small part of the argument.
I have long responded to those negative issues over the years as well as several times in this blog. I am also writing a novel I call “El Nuclear Diablo”, which deals with a potential North American issue of a national nuclear power plant grid-system failure that puts the entire continent at a developing risk of nuclear radiation poisoning, beginning with this very power plant fictionalized. Also, if you read Annie Jacobsen’s new best-selling book “Nuclear War: A Scenario”, you will learn what happens should an invading nuclear armed country (North Korea in her story) drops a nuclear bomb on an operating nuclear power plant. The nuclear power plant she chose? PG&E’s “Diablo Canyon” — the same one I am writing about . . . ~llaw
California legislators break with Gov. Newsom over loan to keep state’s last nuclear plant running
BY MICHAEL R. BLOOD
Updated 3:14 PM PDT, June 13, 2024
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The California Legislature signaled its intent on Thursday to cancel a $400 million loan payment to help finance a longer lifespan for the state’s last nuclear power plant, exposing a rift with Gov. Gavin Newsom who says that the power is critical to safeguarding energy supplies amid a warming climate.
The votes in the state Senate and Assembly on funding for the twin-domed Diablo Canyon plant represented an interim step as Newsom and legislative leaders, all Democrats, continue to negotiate a new budget. But it sets up a public friction point involving one of the governor’s signature proposals, which he has championed alongside the state’s rapid push toward solar, wind and other renewable sources.
The dispute unfolded in Sacramento as environmentalists and antinuclear activists warned that the estimated price tag for keeping the seaside reactors running beyond a planned closing by 2025 had ballooned to nearly $12 billion, roughly doubling earlier projections. That also has raised the prospect of higher fees for ratepayers.
Operator Pacific Gas & Electric called those figures inaccurate and inflated by billions of dollars.
H.D. Palmer, a spokesperson for the California Department of Finance, emphasized that budget negotiations are continuing and the legislative votes represented an “agreement between the Senate and the Assembly — not an agreement with the governor.”
The votes in the Legislature mark the latest development in a decades-long fight over the operation and safety of the plant, which sits on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Diablo Canyon, which began operating in the mid-1980s, produces up to 9% of the state’s electricity on any given day.
The fight over the reactors’ future is playing out as the long-struggling U.S. nuclear industry sees a potential rebirth in the era of global warming. Nuclear power doesn’t produce carbon pollution like fossil fuels, but it leaves behind waste that can remain dangerously radioactive for centuries.
A Georgia utility just finished the first two scratch-built American reactors in a generation at a cost of nearly $35 billion. The price tag for the expansion of Plant Vogtle from two of the traditional large reactors to four includes $11 billion in cost overruns. In Wyoming, Bill Gates and his energy company have started construction on a next-generation nuclear power plant that the tech titan believes will “revolutionize” how power is generated.
In 2016, PG&E, environmental groups and plant worker unions reached an agreement to close Diablo Canyon by 2025. But the Legislature voided the deal in 2022 at the urging of Newsom, who said the power is needed to ward off blackouts as a changing climate stresses the energy system. That agreement for a longer run included a $1.4 billion forgivable state loan for PG&E, to be paid in several installments.
California energy regulators voted in December to extend the plant’s operating run for five years, to 2030.
The legislators’ concerns were laid out in an exchange of letters with the Newsom administration, at a time when the state is trying to close an estimated $45 billion deficit. Among other concerns, they questioned if, and when, the state would be repaid by PG&E, and whether taxpayers could be out hundreds of millions of dollars if the proposed extension for Diablo Canyon falls through.
Construction at Diablo Canyon began in the 1960s. Critics say potential earthquakes from nearby faults not known to exist when the design was approved could damage equipment and release radiation. One fault was not discovered until 2008. PG&E has long said the plant is safe, an assessment the NRC has supported.
Last year, environmental groups called on federal regulators to immediately shut down one of two reactors at the site until tests can be conducted on critical machinery they believe could fail and cause a catastrophe. Weeks later, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission took no action on the request and instead asked agency staff to review it.
The questions raised by environmentalists about the potential for soaring costs stemmed from a review of state regulatory filings submitted by PG&E, they said. Initial estimates of about $5 billion to extend the life of the plant later rose to over $8 billion, then nearly $12 billion, they said.
“It’s really quite shocking,” said attorney John Geesman, a former California Energy Commission member who represents the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, an advocacy group that opposes federal license renewals in California. The alliance told the state Public Utilities Commission in May that the cost would represent “by far the largest financial commitment to a single energy project the commission has ever been asked to endorse.”
PG&E spokesperson Suzanne Hosn said the figures incorrectly included billions of dollars of costs unrelated to extending operations at the plant.
The company has pegged the cost at $8.3 billion, Hosn said, adding that “the financial benefits exceed the costs.”
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Suddenly, potential nuclear war has turned urgently serious. The news is everywhere, full of questions with no answers, so I have returned to my old standby for accurate information, Sky News . . . This Post is set up so you can pick and choose their ‘Key Points’ links of your choice if you want to examine specific issues more thoroughly; or you can read the entire story if you have the time and the curiosity. I will leave opinions, facts and the discussion of issues and circumstances to “Sky News” reporting for now. (Let me just add this: I hope Russia’s movement of ships to Cuba is not a more serious move than the old Cuban Missile crisis in October of 1962) . . . ~llaw
Ukraine-Russia war: Biden and Zelenskyy sign 10-year security deal; Putin’s plan ‘has failed’, Germany says; Russia tells West not to ‘worry’ as its warships arrive in Cuba
Russia reassures the West as its warships arrive in Cuba – while its troops elsewhere practise the electronic launch of missiles in tactical nuclear drills. Meanwhile, world leaders gather in Italy today for a G7 meeting – with the US and Ukraine signing a 10-year security deal.
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… nuclear missiles Nuclear weapons russia Russia Vladimir Putin … things to watch for Biden’s G-7 trip to Italy … all Hill.TV See all Video. Top Stories …
The pilot Natrium nuclear power plant in Kemmerer will be the first of what TerraPower officials hope will be a worldwide fleet of new nuclear energy …
… war effort. Most of the money would be … Russia practiced electronic missile launches during tactical nuclear drills … Footage shows Russian sailors …
The following “Bulletin f the Atomic Scientists” long discussion today indicates to me that the Russia/Ukraine war has become the most likely circumstance to suddenly turn into all out nuclear war with the Russian/Belarus considering what are called ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, defined by Russia as “non-strategic.” and the beginning of military training operations with Belarus. Regardless of what these weapons are called, they make the atomic bombs that decimated Japan little more than, say, 4th of July fireworks compared to dynamite.
NATO’s threats, similar to the United States’, make for an extremely contentious split of how nuclear weapons could become weapons of war, which has never happened since 1945, and only once in world history.
But any kind of nuclear use, no matter how destructive the weapons may or may not be, will instantly create a full-blown nuclear war by retaliation and the suddenly forgotten long-time concept that nuclear ‘deterrence’ that nuclear armed Nations have used as a sense of fear to prevent nuclear war rather than ordinary common sense or the meaningless useless treaties and other agreements among nuclear armed countries. And then there is the Middle East conflict, adding to the world-wide tension. But the possibility or probability of WWII seems to be, at least for now, between the United States and Russia along with their allies. ~llaw
Read on . . .
Why the West should take Russia’s nuclear threats more seriously
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned of nuclear conflict during his annual speech to the nation on February 29, 2024. On June 5, he said the West was wrong to assume Russia would never use nuclear weapons and that the Kremlin’s nuclear doctrine should not be taken lightly. (Credit: Kremlin.ru)
Russian nuclear threats have returned to the forefront of the war in Ukraine, but this time with a new feature: exercises involving tactical nuclear weapons.
These exercises come in response to Western powers signaling broader support for Ukraine. On April 29, for instance, French President Emmanuel Macron reaffirmed his position that France remains open to sending ground troops to Ukraine to bolster European security against Russian aggression. Shortly after, the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, announced that the UK government would support Ukraine using UK-supplied weapons against Russian territory.
In response, Russia characterized these statements as a “completely new round of escalation of tension” and announced on May 6 that it would conduct drills simulating the use of tactical nuclear weapons, or—as Russia describes them—“non-strategic” nuclear weapons. Although these drills constitute a new kind of nuclear threat, they have been dismissed as not credible by a growing number of European countries. But the fine line between skepticism and complacency could pose significant risks for crisis stability in Europe.
Threat or bluff? Russia’s ordering of drills on May 6 mark the first public announcement of military exercises involving tactical nuclear weapons since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The exercises—first conducted on May 7-9 and later expanded to include nuclear bombers on May 27-31—also included Belarus, who agreed to host Russian tactical nuclear weapons in June 2022. By overtly training with tactical nuclear weapons which are specifically designed for battlefield nuclear use and incorporating Belarus into the exercises, Russia has stepped closer to the nuclear threshold and opened new pathways for nuclear escalation.
Despite the new and explicit attention to operational exercises involving tactical nuclear weapons, however, leaders in countries ranging from Lithuania to Ukraine have joined a group of skeptical observers that dismiss the most recent round of Russian threats as a bluff.
The outright dismissal of Russia’s nuclear threats has an intuitive appeal. Nuclear saber-rattling has endured as a persistent but seemingly trivial feature of Russian policy, as evidenced by the lack of nuclear weapons use despite continued and expanding Western support for Ukraine. But whether or not Russia will use nuclear weapons is the wrong way to frame the question; it mischaracterizes the nature and purpose of Russian threats.
The promise to commit national suicide by using nuclear weapons against one or several nuclear-armed states certainly lacks credibility: Russia is not likely to attempt a nuclear first-strike against France, the United Kingdom, or any other NATO member in Europe. The fundamental purpose of Russia’s nuclear behavior, however, is not to aimlessly bluster and hope for deterrent effects but to generate uncertainty and increase the risk that a range of Western actions might trigger nuclear escalation, whether intentionally or inadvertently.
Russia’s current behavior is best described as nuclear shielding, in which a state hides behind the protection of its nuclear arsenal to conduct other forms of aggression. Such behavior lays the groundwork for a crisis to spiral out of control and potentially cross the nuclear threshold. In doing so, Russia is forcing its Western adversaries to choose whether such risks are worth taking in support of Ukraine.
Russian nuclear policy is not built on a series of bluffs. Rather, it captures a fundamental pillar of deterrence theory dating back to the heyday of the Cold War: Threats that leave something to chance and force the adversary to face potentially uncontrollable risks that entail unacceptable costs.
Contrary to the perspective that Russian nuclear threats are empty and ineffective, nuclear weapons have played an essential role in enabling Russia’s war against Ukraine. To the extent that such threats have deterred or slowed Western support—an effect acknowledged by US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan—Russia has successfully leveraged its nuclear arsenal to conduct its conventional invasion of Ukraine.
Understanding the role that Russia’s nuclear weapons have had in the war in Ukraine is therefore essential for crafting policy that enables Western support for Ukraine. It is equally essential for also identifying and mitigating the risks of such support.
Nuclear weapons in Russia’s invasion. The first way in which nuclear weapons have shaped the war in Ukraine is by enabling Russian leaders to invade Ukraine in the first place. With a nuclear shield behind which to hide, Russia could plan on attacking Ukraine without a significant likelihood of Western powers directly intervening to repel a Russian invasion. Such a projection dramatically reduces the potential costs of conflict and, in effect, likely facilitated Russia’s offensive plans and emboldened its aggressive behavior.
In late 2021, Russian leaders began referencing fears of eastward NATO expansion and called for robust security assurances from Western countries. Such requests ring hollow from the country that had already violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum—in which Russia pledged to recognize Ukraine’s territorial integrity—by annexing the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. In practice, however, Russia used these statements to shroud its revisionist aims and begin signaling resolve over the conflict in Ukraine to Western audiences by forcing security issues into the conversation.
Shortly thereafter, Russian President Vladimir Putin built upon the narrative of potential NATO expansion to issue overt nuclear threats. In a news conference, Putin warned that NATO countries would face a greater risk of being drawn into a conflict with Russia “against [their] will” if Ukraine joined NATO. Putin acknowledged that the combined might of NATO’s conventional forces and Russia’s conventional forces are “incomparable,” but then proceeded to note that “Russia is one of the world’s leading nuclear powers” and there would be “no winners” in a NATO-Russia conflict. These comments, which came only two weeks before Russia launched its full-scale conventional invasion, had the clear goal of deterring external involvement in Russia’s forthcoming war.
Zapad-2021—the military exercise Russia used to disguise its military buildup before attacking Ukraine—also provided a chance for Russia to strengthen the credibility of its threats with military actions, rather than just words. Before the invasion of Ukraine, several analysts noted that Zapad-2021 intentionally sought to illustrate to Western audiences the severe costs and escalation risks of a war with Russia, with an emphasis on the nuclear risks of such a conflict. By pairing Russia’s destabilizing rhetoric with the largest iteration of the Zapad series of exercises to date, Moscow was able to increase the perceived risks of escalation that would follow if external actors challenged Russia’s subsequent invasion of Ukraine.
Through these measures, Russia used nuclear threats to initiate its invasion of Ukraine. By clearly associating the political crisis over Ukraine with nuclear threats and conducting major military exercises with potential implications for strategic stability, Russia created sufficient uncertainty and risk of escalation to bolster its deterrent threats and reduce the likelihood of a major Western response. From behind its nuclear shield, Russia was enabled to attack Ukraine.
Leveraging its nuclear posture. The second effect of Russia’s nuclear threats has been the prevention of decisive Western support for Ukraine. Although Ukraine’s partners have provided significant assistance since 2022, concerns of nuclear escalation have resulted in a cautious, incremental approach to Western support. Even to this day, nuclear weapons continue to slow down the Western response to the Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Since 2022, Russia’s declaratory threats have become increasingly paired with changes in operational military behavior on the battlefield. In practice, Russia has slowly but steadily altered its nuclear posture to create greater risks for Western powers in considering a greater involvement in the war in Ukraine. This stands in stark contrast with NATO’s nuclear posture, which has remained unchanged since the war began.
Three days after Russia’s 2022 attack, Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces to assume a “special combat readiness” and increase the arsenal’s alert status. Only two months later, Russia successfully tested the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, which possesses a short boost phase that complicates tracking and increases its chances of defeating ballistic missile defenses. Alongside this demonstration of improved nuclear capability, Yury Borisov, the director general of the Roscosmos State Corporation, announced that the Sarmat had been placed on combat duty, while Putin warned that Western powers should “think twice” about threatening Russia.
Since these initial displays of greater operational nuclear preparedness, Russia has only rattled its nuclear saber more loudly.
The most notable example of Russia leveraging its nuclear posture to intentionally create greater escalation risks has been the increasing salience of tactical nuclear weapons in Russia’s threats. In March 2023, Putin announced that Russia would develop a “special storage facility for tactical weapons on Belarusian territory,” where Russia would station some of its tactical nuclear weapons assigned specifically to battlefield missions.
The recent drills involving Russia and Belarus exercising their roles in a nuclear mission capitalize on their new nuclear sharing agreement. They mark a notable step up the escalatory ladder to serve as a renewed deterrent signal to Western countries. Through these exercises, Russia is showing a greater commitment to taking risks in the nuclear arena and challenging its adversaries to accept such risks if they plan to oppose Russia in Ukraine more directly.
In the background, other trends in Russia’s nuclear posture exacerbate the dangers posed by tactical nuclear weapons activities.
Russia is currently engaged in a decades-long modernization effort that implies a greater focus on regional warfighting strategies. Putin’s rhetoric in October 2022 revealed a meaningful shift in this regard, as his speech broadened the conditions under which Russia would use nuclear weapons from when “the very existence of the state is under threat” to anytime “the territorial integrity… independence and freedom” of Russia are at stake. A February 2024 report purporting to have obtained leaked Russian military files further suggests that tactical nuclear first-use is a serious option for Russia, and the thresholds for nuclear use might be lower than previously thought.
The greater emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons in military planning and an apparent reduction of barriers to nuclear use have created significant escalation risks in the war in Ukraine. In effect, these actions are precisely the concerns expressed by US President Joe Biden when he stated in October 2022 that the “prospect of Armageddon” was the highest it had been since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, largely due to the possibility of Russia deploying tactical nuclear weapons.
Countering Russia’s nuclear shadowing. Russia has not used nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine, but that does not mean its nuclear threats are merely bluffs. To the contrary, evolutions in the rhetoric, capabilities, and posture underpinning Russian nuclear threats indicate that Moscow is slowly—but surely—working to undermine strategic stability and increase the credibility of its threats.
Recent research shows that frequent nuclear threats—even if extreme and seemingly excessive—are indicative of issues about which the threatening state deeply cares, and such threats are often associated with aggressive action. Russia’s statements and behaviors related to nuclear weapons in Ukraine suggest that even if the likelihood of nuclear escalation is low, it cannot be dismissed outright.
The overriding policy implication of this analysis is not that Western allies should abandon their efforts to support Ukraine. Rather, they should purposefully calibrate responses to mitigate the risks of nuclear escalation.
Deterrence can be framed as a competition in risk-taking, in which conflicting parties attempt to coerce their opponent into backing down. Therefore, to compete with Russia, Western countries must accept at least some level of risk and force Russia to consider how to respond to Western actions. The challenge is to determine which competitive risk-taking measures can stymie Russian advances without triggering a massive escalatory response.
For example, Putin almost certainly has thresholds that—if crossed or simply approached—could prompt the use of nuclear weapons. At the same time, Western allies have provided significant aid to Ukraine without trigging a Russian nuclear response. The level of support provided to Ukraine undoubtedly crossed the threshold of what Russia would have deemed acceptable. However, in the same way the West has been reluctant to decisively intervene, Russia has not strongly reacted against Ukraine’s external partners.
The West’s incremental approach to provide support shows that Russian aggression can be meaningfully countered without incurring unacceptable levels of risk. Notably, even the recent approval for Ukraine to use Western-supplied weapons against Russian territory has been met with a limited Russian response.
Western countries should not be immobilized by fear of Russian threats, but they should nevertheless take the risks of conflict seriously. Despite an emerging narrative that Russian nuclear threats are not credible, these threats continue to pose tangible risks for crisis stability. As Putin recently stated, the West would be wrong to completely ignore Russia’s doctrine and threats to use nuclear weapons first in a conflict.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, many Western states were skeptical of US warnings regarding an imminent Russian attack. This skepticism was clearly misplaced, however, and Western leaders should avoid repeating such complacency in response to Russia’s nuclear threats. The outright rejection of Russian threats could lead the West to stumble into a nuclear crisis and force decisions in the face of massive risk and significant uncertainty.
Russia can be opposed, but Western policymakers must be prudent in their actions to manage the potentially low—yet very real—risks of nuclear escalation.
Editor’s note: The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the US Air Force, the US Defense Department, or the US government.
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Bill Gates shakes the hand of Wyoming governor Mark Gordon (in the cowboy outfit) at the TerraPower groundbreaking ceremony a few miles south of Kemmerer, Wyoming. /image courtesy of WyoFile.com
Here is the latest on TerraPower’s intent to build this 1st of its kind plant and hopefully “mass produce” future ones by employing a new kind of state-of-the-art small nuclear reactor power plants (SMRs) that will cool the plant with, Natrium (the plants name), a sodium-based cooling system along with a molten salt waste storage system.
But there are plenty of pros and even more cons, including ensuring the kind of nuclear fuel it will use, which is refined uranium to near nuclear bomb standards. Russia (and perhaps a few military facilities) is the only market for this rare uranium fuel, and Russia may well refuse to sell the fuel to TerraPower — in fact Russia has already delayed TerraPower’s plans for two years by withholding the sale of this fuel to operate the planned 1st demonstration of the new power plant. And so it goes, but TerraPower says they are beginning construction now regardless of fuel availability and regulatory approval of the plant design, partly because the cooling system has never been used before.
But no matter how we frame, color, or present nuclear poser plants, nuclear bombs, and all other things nuclear, the unredeemable element is that they all use nuclear fuel (refined uranium), which I believe is the most dangerous product ever created by mankind, and if we continue to use it (in any form), it will eventually destroy humanity and other life on a global scale, and we are right now, this very day, staring it in the face. We ought to know better. We were put on notice in August of 1945. ~llaw
(My comments above are a refresher for those of you who may have read one or more of my Posts on this very subject in previous evenings of my “All Things Nuclear” blog. But there are also numerous related links, as well as two other same subject news stories in the “Nuclear Power” nuclear news section of today’s news below, to this and other stories, of course, at the end of this article.)
Bill Gates is breaking ground on a nuclear power plant in Wyoming
Bill Gates and his energy company are starting construction at their Wyoming site for a next-generation nuclear power plant he believes will “revolutionize” how power is generated.
Gates was in the tiny community of Kemmerer Monday to break ground on the project. The co-founder of Microsoft is chairman of TerraPower. The company applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in March for a construction permit for an advanced nuclear reactor that uses sodium, not water, for cooling. If approved, it would operate as a commercial nuclear power plant.
The site is adjacent to PacifiCorp’s Naughton Power Plant, which will stop burning coal in 2026 and natural gas a decade later, the utility said. Nuclear reactors operate without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gases. PacifiCorp plans to get carbon-free power from the reactor and says it is weighing how much nuclear to include in its long-range planning.
The work begun Monday is aimed at having the site ready so TerraPower can build the reactor as quickly as possible if its permit is approved. Russia is at the forefront for developing sodium-cooled reactors.
Gates told the audience at the groundbreaking that they were “standing on what will soon be the bedrock of America’s energy future.”
“This is a big step toward safe, abundant, zero-carbon energy,” Gates said. “And it’s important for the future of this country that projects like this succeed.”
Advanced reactors typically use a coolant other than water and operate at lower pressures and higher temperatures. Such technology has been around for decades, but the United States has continued to build large, conventional water-cooled reactors as commercial power plants. The Wyoming project is the first time in about four decades that a company has tried to get an advanced reactor up and running as a commercial power plant in the United States, according to the NRC.
It’s time to move to advanced nuclear technology that uses the latest computer modeling and physics for a simpler plant design that’s cheaper, even safer and more efficient, said Chris Levesque, the company’s president and chief executive officer.
TerraPower’s Natrium reactor demonstration project is a sodium-cooled fast reactor design with a molten salt energy storage system.
“The industry’s character hasn’t been to innovate. It’s kind of been to repeat past performance, you know, not to move forward with new technology. And that was good for reliability,” Levesque said in an interview. “But the electricity demands we’re seeing in the coming decades, and also to correct the cost issues with today’s nuclear and nuclear energy, we at TerraPower and our founders really felt it’s time to innovate.”
A Georgia utility just finished the first two scratch-built American reactors in a generation at a cost of nearly $35 billion. The price tag for the expansion of Plant Vogtle from two of the traditional large reactors to four includes $11 billion in cost overruns.
The TerraPower project is expected to cost up to $4 billion, half of it from the U.S. Department of Energy. Levesque said that figure includes first-of-its-kind costs for designing and licensing the reactor, so future ones would cost significantly less.
Most advanced nuclear reactors under development in the U.S. rely on a type of fuel — known as high-assay low-enriched uranium — that’s enriched to a higher percentage of the isotope uranium-235 than the fuel used by conventional reactors. TerraPower delayed its launch date in Wyoming by two years to 2030 because Russia is the only commercial supplier of the fuel, and it’s working with other companies to develop alternate supplies. The U.S. Energy Department is working on developing it domestically.
Edwin Lyman co-authored an article in Science on Thursday that raises concerns that this fuel could be used for nuclear weapons. Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the risk posed by HALEU today is small because there isn’t that much of it around the world. But that will change if advanced reactor projects, which require much larger quantities, move forward, he added. Lyman said he wants to raise awareness of the danger in the hope that the international community will strengthen security around the fuel.
NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell said the agency is confident its current requirements will maintain both security and public safety of any reactors that are built and their fuel.
Gates co-founded TerraPower in 2008 as a way for the private sector to propel advanced nuclear energy forward to provide safe, abundant, carbon-free energy.
The company’s 345-megawatt reactor could generate up to 500 megawatts at its peak, enough for up to 400,000 homes. TerraPower said its first few reactors will focus on supplying electricity. But it envisions future reactors could be built near industrial plants to supply high heat.
Nearly all industrial processes requiring high heat currently get it from burning fossil fuels. Heat from advanced reactors could be used to produce hydrogen, petrochemicals, ammonia and fertilizer, said John Kotek at the Nuclear Energy Institute.
It’s significant that Gates, a technological innovator and climate champion, is betting on nuclear power to help address the climate crisis, added Kotek, the industry group’s senior vice president for policy.
“I think this has helped open people’s eyes to the role that nuclear power does play today and can play in the future in addressing carbon emissions,” he said. “There’s tremendous momentum building for new nuclear in the U.S. and the potential use of a far wider range of nuclear energy technology than we’ve seen in decades.”
Left: File photo by Ritzau Scanpix/Mads Claus Rasmussen via Reuters
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This is the same incredibly morbid, costly, and deceitful fear-mongering method of ‘deterrence’ through increasing nuclear weapons of mass destruction and then threatening the rest of the world that you will use them in nuclear war that I have been alluding to for the past two days. It is all supposed to remain a necessary lie, just a threat and nothing more, but this kind of avoiding war inevitably has to stop sometime or else some country or other will eventually use their massive stockpile out of financial bankruptcy and/or sheer desperation. ~llaw
US Mulls Increased Deployment of Nuclear Weapons Amid Rising Threats
The US has floated the idea of fielding more strategic nuclear weapons in the future to deter growing threats from Russia, China, and other adversaries.
Speaking at an arms control event last week, National Security Council official Pranay Vaddisaid Moscow and Beijing’s rejection of nuclear arsenal limitation highlights the increased need to employ a more competitive approach to prepare for these threats.
He further stated that with the absence of an agreement, more nuclear weapons may be required to effectively deter adversaries and protect the American people and allies.
“We may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required. We need to be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision,” Vaddi explained.
At present, the US observes a limit of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads as stipulated in a 2010 treaty with Russia.
Moscow has already suspended its participation in the agreement because of Washington’s support for Ukraine.
‘At a Breakneck Pace’
In 2023, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said he believed there was no need to increase the size of America’s nuclear arsenal to deter the combined forces of Russia, China, and other rivals.
He also announced that the US will abide by the nuclear weapons limits set by its treaty with Russia until 2026.
But Vaddi pointed out that these adversaries are all expanding and diversifying their nuclear arsenals “at a breakneck pace.”
China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are reportedly “cooperating and coordinating with each other in ways that run counter to peace and stability, threaten the US, our allies and our partners, and exacerbate region[al] tensions.”
Last month, Moscow fueled nuclear war concerns after President Vladimir Putin ordered his military to hold nuclear weapons drills near Ukraine.
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Our shallow and virtually useless dependence on human law and how easily cast-off treaties and agreements mean nothing between or among rival Nations, and how we depend on something called ‘deterrence’, which is little more than a mutually applicable governmental political and military money sink paid for by each country’s working taxpayers while we build more nuclear weapons for the sake of ‘deterrence’, constantly followed by more costly and more powerful nuclear weapons. Such inanity cannot last forever, of course.
The Gibran free verse presented below about truths and lies is an excellent existential truth about untruths! Gibran, no doubt unintentionally, clearly demonstrates how our human world functions these days, and his verse is incidentally an axiom of the threats of nuclear war. Our world leaders of nuclear armed Nations, use lies as threats to other leaders of nuclear armed Nations in order to avoid nuclear war out of imposing fear, which the governmental, military, and political worlds of today call “deterrence”. So it is that bald-faced lies rather than honest common sense apparently protect us (at least for now) from Armageddon! ~llaw
(Thank you Deborah Hart Yemm for your brilliant post at a time when the world needs it most!)
“The Lie said to the Truth-
Let’s take a bath together,
the well water is very nice.
The Truth, still suspicious,
tested the water and found out
it really was nice.
So they got naked and bathed.
But suddenly, the Lie leapt out of the water
and fled, wearing the clothes of the Truth.
The Truth, furious, climbed out of the well
to get her clothes back.
But the World, upon seeing the naked Truth,
looked away, with anger and contempt.
Poor Truth returned to the well and disappeared
forever, hiding her shame.
Since then, the Lie runs around the world,
dressed as the Truth, and society is very happy.
Because the world has no desire to know
the naked Truth.”
~ Gibran Khalil Gibran
Truth Coming Out Of The Well Painting by Jean-Léon Gérome, 1896
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Which is all well and good, except for when these things … We also knew a thing or two about low level flying in SAC. … payload (nuclear), 1 free-fall …
This is another recent update on the extremely tense issue in Ukraine centered around the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), already located in an ongoing war zone, with the possibility of turning even more consequential as a war weapon of mass destruction, which could spread into European countries and around the globe creating serious aggravating already frazzled tensions relative to global war, or, quite logically, World War III. Therefore, and also because the IAEA has overseers onsite at the ZNPP itself, I will frequently be posting the IAEA’s updates concerning this frightening situation without any personal comment, except reminders that the situation is grave . . . ~llaw
Update 231 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
Update 231 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
06 Jun 2024
53/2024
Vienna, Austria
The challenging nuclear safety and security situation in Ukraine was in the spotlight again this week at the International Atomic Energy Agency, with its Board of Governors discussing recent developments detailed in a new IAEA report and Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi meeting the country’s energy minister.
Director General Grossi and Energy Minister German Galushchenko discussed the IAEA’s ongoing efforts to support nuclear safety and security in Ukraine in their meeting today on the sidelines of the regularly scheduled June Board session at IAEA headquarters, where the Director General earlier in the week made clear his continued deep concerns about the situation.
Nuclear safety and security remains especially precarious at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), and is potentially also fragile elsewhere in Ukraine following attacks on its energy infrastructure in recent months, including on electricity sub-stations which are vital in providing off-site power to the operating nuclear power stations, as well as to the ZNPP, Director General Grossi said after his talks with Minister Galushchenko.
Nuclear power plants (NPPs) need reliable access to off-site power in order to cool their reactors and for other essential nuclear safety and security functions, as underlined in the Seven Pillars of Nuclear Safety and Security. However, Ukraine’s electricity grid has been severely impacted by the conflict, with the ZNPP repeatedly losing connections to all its power lines.
“For the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in particular, the external power situation remains extremely vulnerable, prone to frequent outages. But it is also a wider concern in the current circumstances, where a loss of off-site power event has the potential to be even more serious given the higher nuclear fuel temperatures for reactors in operation in Ukraine. We are continuing to follow the situation very closely in this regard, as I also informed Minister Galushchenko in today’s meeting,” Director General Grossi said.
Director General Grossi, who had met with Rosatom head Alexey Likhachev in the Russian city of Kaliningrad last week, reiterated to Ukraine’s energy minister that there was an understanding that the ZNPP would not be re-started as long as nuclear safety and security remained in jeopardy due to the conflict.
“In these circumstances, operating this major nuclear plant would not be advisable,” he said.
Ahead of this week’s Board meeting, the Director General issued the 11th report on nuclear safety, security and safeguards in Ukraine since the conflict began in February 2022, covering developments in the three months to 24 May this year.
At the ZNPP this week, the IAEA team of experts stationed at the site has continued to conduct regular walkdowns to monitor nuclear safety and security at the plant.
At the same time, the team has continued to hear explosions some distance away from the site, a regular reminder of the ZNPP’s frontline location.
A year after the destruction of the downstream Kakhovka dam disrupted the ZNPP’s supplies of cooling water, the team visited the site’s cooling pond and observed that its height was almost 1.5 metres below the level before the dam was destroyed.
The plant, whose six reactors are all in cold shutdown, receives the cooling water it needs, for the reactors in the current shutdown state, from 11 groundwater wells that were built to supply about 250 m3 of water per hour to the site’s sprinkler ponds.
The IAEA team continues to closely monitor the maintenance activities at the plant, another area highlighted by the Director General as posing a potential risk to nuclear safety and security in his Board statement on Monday.
As part of these activities, the IAEA experts visited the 750 kilovolt (kV) open switchyard and discussed ongoing maintenance on the relay protections for the transformer of reactor unit 2, among other activities.
They saw that some of the switchyard components, for one of the 750 kV lines, that were damaged in 2022 had been dismantled. However, the ZNPP is not currently planning to complete repairs, at this time, as the line itself remains unavailable due to damage sustained earlier in the conflict, away from the site. The ZNPP had four 750 kV lines available before the conflict, but only one is remaining.
The IAEA experts were informed that western-supplied switchyard equipment, installed before the conflict, remained in good condition. The ZNPP also stated that some spare parts remain available on site from western supplies and, if required, it can order similar equipment through suppliers from the Russian Federation.
The IAEA team of experts also visited the two fresh fuel storage facilities and the turbine building of unit 6, once again without being granted access to the western side of the building.
In addition, the ZNPP informed the IAEA experts on the status of its on- and off-site radiation monitoring stations. The team was informed that all four on-site radiation monitoring stations are operational, but that three of the 14 off-site stations remain damaged as a result of military activities in 2022.
The ZNPP said that manual radiation monitoring measurements are also carried out, and that there are plans to purchase new radiation monitoring stations consistent with the regulations of the Russian Federation, and a mobile radiation measurement laboratory for use in case of a nuclear or radiological emergency.
The IAEA experts present at Ukraine’s other NPPs – Khelmnytskyy, Rivne and South Ukraine – and the Chornobyl site continue to perform routine walkdowns and assess nuclear safety and security. The teams reported that nuclear safety and security is being maintained despite the effects of the ongoing conflict, including air raid alarms on several days over the past week.
One reactor unit at each of the Rivne and the South Ukraine NPPs were in shutdown over the last week for planned maintenance and refuelling, while one other unit at the South Ukraine NPP is in planned outage.
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MARTÍNEZ: All right. So what does advertising for HealthCare.gov tell us about the two presidential candidates? SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Well, a lot. So we can …
The Russian official said that as long as Russia’s existence is not threatened, Moscow “will never use nuclear weapons.” “If there is a real threat to …
This absurd cartoon, as well as the critical article, misses the more direct point of Annie Jacobsen’s new novel “Nuclear War: A Scenario” mistakenly believing that mankind is invincible because we seem to think that nuclear war is based only on the logic(?) of what “human beings plan to do to each other for human reasons”.
Of course the “problem is us”, and Amy Jacobsen, the author who is being criticized in the posted article below, obviously and clearly recognizes that. So do I get it, and there is no reason to dwell on it by turning a 400 page book up to 800 to explain the well known intellectual ‘frailty’ of misguided human beings who believe we are far more intelligent than we are. The author, Matthew Petti, has a very good head on his own shoulders, and he knows, like Ms. Jacobsen knows, that the we ‘humans’ foolishly built and build these atomic/nuclear bombs and also build nuclear power plants, which is just as arrogantly stupid. And we believe we are in control of it all when we have no clue.
Is Matthew Petti being overly critical and tough on Ms. Jacobsen for writing such a powerful book that more than gets its point across? Or is it just typical male ego making chest-beating noise. He uses the word ‘fails’ in a few places about how Jacobsen’s book, which is not science fiction by the way, and which helps to explain why she doesn’t concentrate on the misled villains and their actions as much as Petti would like her to. I can say I already was well-aware of the misguided ‘villains’ and who the instigators were and are, and I have no doubt that Ms. Jacobsen does, too.
In support of what Mr. Petti has to say, he clearly draws the same conclusion as Ms. Jacobsen, who says it in a more direct and matter-of-fact way, only implying that we are egotistically playing a game of chess that has never been played before, pretending we know how.
And, as for the turtle cartoon, there is no way to “find shelter”, as Annie Jacobsen so clearly points out, in a nuclear war — nor a seriously “damaged” nuclear power plant. ~llaw
The most unsettling book I have ever read is “The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Attacks Against the United States,” by Jeffrey Lewis.
As the title suggests, it’s an alternative history in which the diplomacy between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un goes terribly wrong. While Lewis criticizes Trump and Kim’s style of governing, the story is not about a mad king destroying the world. Instead, it demonstrates how governments concerned with their own interests and survival can misread each other’s signals and accidentally escalate beyond the point of no return.
A new book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario” by Annie Jacobsen, promises to provide the same kind of realistic, unsettling scenario. Based on dozens of interviews with former officials, Jacobsen plots out minute by minute and second by second how a nuclear exchange would happen.
She illuminates — at least as far as her sources are legally allowed to — the processes that govern American and Russian nuclear command and control. The reader learns what alarms would go off in which control rooms, what orders would have to be spoken to which officials, and which keys would have to be turned in which silos during an apocalypse. It is supposed to worry the readers.
The book falls short of that goal. It treats nuclear war as an incomprehensible horror, rather than something human beings plan to do to each other for human reasons, and focuses on the most unlikely scenarios. For all the action-movie details about nuclear weapons being deployed, Jacobsen fails to explain how or why a nuclear war might start. In other words, she treats nuclear annihilation like an asteroid strike or a bear attack, something that is scary to picture but fundamentally impossible to predict or stop. So why should the reader worry about it in day-to-day life?
“With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group,” Jacobsen concludes. “It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.” Perhaps that’s a call to abolish nuclear weapons. If so, Jacobsen doesn’t provide any reason to believe that might happen.
And by juxtaposing the murderous insanity of nuclear war with the sleek efficiency of the institutions designed to fight one, Jacobsen might have hoped to jar her readers. Instead, the book comes off as a demented combination of anti-war pamphlet and U.S. military recruitment ad. (“The function of NATO is to further democratic values and peacefully resolve disputes,” comes right after a graphic description of everyone in Washington burning to death.) The only real coherent point it makes is how little time world leaders have to deliberate and react to a nuclear launch—which is certainly an important problem.
But again, Jacobsen does not explain why they might be faced with such a problem. “Nuclear War” focuses on a “Bolt out of the Blue” scenario, the U.S. military’s term for a complete surprise attack. Although that kind of attack might be “what everyone in DC fears the most,” according to a former assistant secretary of defense who speaks to Jacobsen, it is the least likely fear to come true. As Jacobsen herself admits, an unprovoked nuclear first strike would be “national suicide” for any country that launches it. What kind of a madman would do that?
Her answer is Kim, the North Korean ruler. “In this scenario, we don’t know why the North Korean leader chose to launch a Bolt out of the Blue attack against America, but paranoia almost most certainly played a role,” Jacobsen asserts. She throws out a theory about Kim feeling slighted by satellite photos of North Korea at night. To show how Kim fits the bill of a “nihilistic madman,” the book cites examples of how oppressive the North Korean system is. Oppressive, however, doesn’t mean suicidal. If Kim lives lavishly while his citizens starve, shouldn’t he want to keep that arrangement going?
Jacobsen misrepresents the purpose of the North Korean nuclear program by glossing over its history. The Clinton administration, she writes, tried to convince North Korea “to abandon the [nuclear] program in exchange for economic benefits. The result was nil.” In reality, North Korea did agree to the deal, which broke down a decade later. Believing that North Korea was about to collapse, the Clinton administration implemented it only halfheartedly. North Korea, of course, shirked its own obligations in return, provoking the Bush administration to tear up the deal completely.
The supervillain theory of geopolitics, in which America’s enemies are plotting to destroy the world for fun, doesn’t make sense. China, Russia, and North Korea all oppose the U.S.-led world order due to their specific national interests. For all of those countries, nuclear weapons are the ultimate life insurance policy. The real danger posed by North Korea lies in the Kim dynasty’s rational fears; they know that they are quite vulnerable to both internal and external enemies, so their threat calculus likely leaves little room for error.
The “2020 Commission Report,” on the other hand, lays out the kind of crisis that might push things over the edge. After a North Korean radar crew mistakes a malfunctioning South Korean airliner for a hostile bomber, fighting breaks out on the peninsula. The Trump administration believes that, through threatening bluster, it can force North Korea to stand down and restore calm. Instead, the threats convince Kim that a regime change war has already begun, and that he must show strength to force the United States to back off. That scenario — a series of “normal” mistakes adding up to an extreme outcome — makes more sense to worry about than an unlikely bolt out of the blue.
Strangely enough, Jacobsen also describes American policy as irrationally genocidal. She quotes John Rubel, a former U.S. defense official who sat through the secret unveiling of the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the 1960 plan for a “general nuclear war.” Years later, a guilt-stricken Rubel compared himself and the generals in the planning room to the Nazis who plotted the Holocaust, according to Jacobsen. After all, the Single Integrated Operational Plan called for the murder of hundreds of millions of civilians, many of them random bystanders in third countries, not counting the Americans who would be obliterated in retaliation.
Daniel Ellsberg, another defense planner from the 1960s, had a similar reaction when he read the death estimates. “This piece of paper should not exist,” he remembered thinking in “The Doomsday Machine,” his 2017 memoir. “It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever. There should be nothing on earth, nothing real, that it referred to.” Ellsberg, who died in 2023 and whose parents were Jewish, called it a scheme for “a hundred Holocausts.”
“The Doomsday Machine,” however, goes beyond his immediate reaction to explain why such evil does exist in the world. In the 1930s and 1940s, military planners around the world had come to accept that “strategic bombing,” the destruction of enemy cities from a distance, would be the best way to end wars quickly. When the atomic bomb was created, the U.S. military simply thought of it as a more efficient version of the firebombs it was already dropping on German and Japanese cities. For a couple decades after World War II, planners continued to believe in the possibility of a “damage-limiting” nuclear strike, of wiping out the enemy’s weapons in order to save cities at home.
After many close brushes with nuclear war, world leaders slowly developed the understanding that nuclear weapons were a completely different kind of weapon. And these close brushes, for the most part, were not random or irrational events. Incidents like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis were the result of politics, when one superpower pressed its advantage too hard and set off its rival’s survival instinct. Even a 1983 false alarm in Moscow that Jacobsen mentions, the closest thing to a real-life bolt out of the blue scenario, came amid rising U.S.-Soviet military tensions in Europe.
The knowledge that mass murder can be a product of normal human motivations is depressing. Yet it’s also a relief. Nuclear war is not an inhuman force like an asteroid or a bear. It is a political problem with political solutions. There are many steps that world powers can take — even short of abolishing nuclear weapons — to reduce the risks, by communicating and respecting each other’s existential fears. Ellsberg, for example, called on the United States and Russia to at least deactivate the weapons designed for a first strike and take forces off of hair-trigger alert.
The enemy is not, as Jacobsen writes, any specific vilified nation. But it is not the nuclear weapons, inanimate objects sitting in silos, either. The problem is us. Nuclear weapons, like every other nasty implement of war, are a means to a human end.
Matthew Petti is an assistant editor at Reason Magazine. He worked for various Jordanian news outlets as a 2022-2023 Fulbright fellow. Previously, he worked as a reporter at Responsible Statecraft and a national security reporter at The National Interest. His work has appeared in the BBC, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, and New Lines magazine.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
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Mr Macron did not specify how many single-engine jet fighters would be provided, by when or under what financial terms. He said France had proposed to …
… nuclear war is not imminent, it is a possibility. … The Russian official said that as long as Russia’s existence is not threatened, Moscow “will never …
The remains of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant still in the process of being cleaned up since the deathly meltdown in Norther Ukraine in the spring of 1986.
I’m wondering if Russia hasn’t been subtly using the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) as an ominous potential nuclear weapon all along. I have mentioned as much many times in these “All Things Nuclear” Posts, and if Russia continues on with this ‘threat’ (that’s what it is) they will ‘accidentally’, but intentionally, create a meltdown that will be multiple times worse than the last one they had (Chernobyl in April of 1986), and that one was more than bad enough. One could say no one lives there anymore.
This one, in a war zone, could be a serious threat to a significant part of Ukraine and Europe. From my views of following the long story for well over a year now, it appears to me that Russia (who operates the plant) is gradually working toward the day when they can blame Ukraine for causing the travesty that could kill thousands if not millions of people depending on the wind currents. Both nations have accused each other of repeatedly firing conventional weapons in attempts to substantially damage the plant, and the same thing applies to recent sabotage to the incoming electricity power grid and lines that allows the 6 reactors to function without failing, thereby creating a meltdown. Transmission lines repairs and use of diesel power generators have so far kept the plant (when operating) from melting down, creating hell on earth for that part of the world. ~llaw
Despite the risks, Russia continues to use Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant as a source of leverage
To minimize Russia’s leverage from holding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant at risk, Ukraine’s partners must press Moscow to keep all reactors shut down and help Kyiv to prepare for a possible nuclear safety incident at the plant. (Credit: Image by Florent via Adobe Stock)
In April, The Wall Street Journalreported that Russia may be planning to restart at least one of the six reactors at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), which Russia has occupied since March 2022. The reporting raised concerns about the safety of the plant, were such a decision to be taken. Then on May 28, Aleksey Likhachev, the head of Russia’s state-owned nuclear enterprise, Rosatom, stated that the restarting of the ZNPP would be conditional on guarantees of the facility’s safety, adding that “time will tell” how the requisite safety conditions will be met and that they could be achieved through the retreat of the front line “as far as possible” from the ZNPP.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has since confirmed that an understanding has been reached that the ZNPP’s six reactors “should remain in cold shutdown for the time being.”
But as long as the ZNPP remains under Russian occupation, Moscow will be able to continue using the plant as a source of blackmail to pre-empt any future Ukrainian effort to regain control. To counter Russia’s nuclear blackmailing, Western countries must intensify their military, nuclear safety, and emergency response support to Ukraine, as well as counter Russian disinformation in relation to the state of ZNPP operations and attacks on the facility. Such measures can help minimize the coercive value Moscow may believe it can draw from further threatening the plant’s safety.
Safety risks. Russia has demonstrated a clear disregard for nuclear safety since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Therefore, Likhachev’s comments about the need to guarantee ZNPP safety before restarting the plant must be taken with a grain of salt, and certainly not as any kind of assurance that reactors will not be restarted while the plant remains in a war zone. Moreover, so long as Russia maintains control over the ZNPP, Russian operators and regulators will want to dictate when they deem the facility safe for operation, even though the plant’s safety remains in a highly precarious state.
While the ZNPP is not currently in the vicinity of the heaviest fighting, it is still near the front line, with IAEA staff posted at the facility regularly reporting sounds of explosions. Recent drone attacks on the facility do not appear to have caused significant damage but they serve as a reminder of the persistent risk that a military strike—intentional or not—could trigger a safety emergency.
With the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in June 2023 and subsequent draining of the Kakhovka reservoir, the plant lost its main water supply for removing radioactive decay heat from the reactors and spent fuel storage pools and for cooling the emergency diesel generators that kick in when the plant loses external power. The plant regularly loses connection to external power because of attacks on Ukraine’s electric grid and damage to the power lines connecting the plant to the grid. In addition, the IAEA has reported on the presence of anti-personnel mines both around the perimeter of the plant and on the grounds of the facility. There is also a shortage of qualified staff operating at the facility, as many Ukrainian staff have departed due to the conflict or were forced to leave if they refused to take Russian citizenship and sign contracts with Rosatom.
Since September 2022, all six of the plant’s 950-megawatt-electric reactors have been in a shutdown state—alternating between cold and hot shutdown—which has been a key factor in reducing the likelihood of a major radiological disaster at the ZNPP. A unit in a shutdown state is subcritical, meaning that the nuclear fission in the reactor is not self-sustaining and therefore the reactor doesn’t produce power. The core of a reactor in shutdown is at a lower temperature, and the unit requires less cooling water and external power than a fully operating unit. In the case of cold shutdown, the core is at a lower temperature than in hot shutdown and the containment vessel is kept at atmospheric pressure. This allows for more time and options to deal with possible power and coolant loss. Should water or power supply to shutdown reactors be cut off or damaged, experienced operators would likely have several days to prevent escalation to a serious nuclear safety incident (depending on the nature of the damage). This safety margin could shrink to mere hours for an operating reactor.
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There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
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Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… nuclear power to generate electricity, alongside other sources of energy? … nuclear power plants as part of its plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
… nuke power plant … How would officials in Pennsylvania and West Virginia responde in the event of an emergency at the facility? … nuclear power plant …
To counter Russia’s nuclear blackmailing, Western countries must intensify their military, nuclear safety, and emergency response support to Ukraine, …
